Proficiency Releases Collaboration Gateway Version 2.0

New Viewer, CATIA V5 Support, and Additional Features Unleash the Value of Product Collaboration for the Entire Enterprise

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - November 18, 2002 - Continuing to produce break through CAD collaboration software for OEMs and their suppliers, Proficiency today unveiled the newest generation of its award-winning Collaboration Gateway product. The Collaboration Gateway version 2.0 (CG2.0), includes a number of new enhancements, including additional part- and assembly-level features, selective export capabilities, a Universal Product Representation (UPR) Viewer, and enterprise extensions to make it the first interoperability solution capable of sharing product development design information with downstream applications for manufacturing, analysis, customers, suppliers, and other business units, including non-CAD users.

"With version 2.0, Proficiency has extended the application of our Universal Product Representation technology in order to dramatically improve the processes involved in product development,' said Scott Berkey, President and CEO of Proficiency. "This technology is not focused on simply removing a few hours from a data exchange task; it is about fundamentally changing the way products are created - moving analysis further upstream into design, more tightly coupling design with manufacturing, and more closely integrating the collaborative efforts of OEMs and their suppliers - enabling significant time and cost reduction."

Product Development Collaboration for the Entire Enterprise

Proficiency extends its collaboration offerings through a new Universal Product Representation (UPR) Viewer module. The UPR is a representation of design intelligence, independent of the originating CAD system. Proficiency's Collaboration Gateway extracts design intelligence, including features, history, metadata, dimensions, etc, into the UPR. The new UPR Viewer enables CAD and non-CAD operators alike to see the design intelligence encapsulated in the UPR. Complementary to traditional geometric viewers, the UPR Viewer is used in situations when design intelligence is the focus, and can provide an unprecedented level of information to workers from the finance department to the assembly floor, as well as engineers who do not necessarily know the originating CAD system.

Additionally, Proficiency's Collaboration Gateway now includes interfaces allowing it to be accessed programmatically by the other applications, including PLM applications used by OEMs and suppliers, including PDM and ERP software. Transparently to the user, these third-party applications can automatically invoke the Collaboration Gateway to deliver a design in a preferred CAD format.

"D.H. Brown believes that abstraction, translation, and synthesis are critical requirements to achieve success in product lifecycle management," said Dr. Kenneth Versprille, Director of Design and Validation for D.H. Brown Associates. "With release 2.0 of the Collaboration Gateway, the addition of the UPR Viewer and application-callable APIs, Proficiency is establishing its technology as a collaboration platform, addressing both abstraction and synthesis, not just translation or feature-based re-mastering."

Extending Proficiency's Lead in Automated CAD Interoperability

Founded in 1998, Proficiency was the first company todevelop a web-based, feature-level CAD interoperability software product that companies host on their network. Extending Proficiency's leadership position in the marketplace, the Collaboration Gateway v2.0:

• Offers the UPR Viewer, allowing non-CAD users to see the design intelligence of the model that was extracted to the UPR. Unlike other viewers that only display geometry or tessellated faces of a solid, the UPR viewer displays the full feature history tree, and allows users to "walk" the model as it was created, step-by-step. Additionally, Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerance (GD&T) information is displayed, an industry first, and a revolutionary step tying design information with manufacturing activity;
• Includes support for Dassault Syst�mes' CATIA� v5, CATIA v4, PTC's Pro/ENGINEER�, and EDS PLM Solutions' Unigraphics* and I-DEAS�;
• Incorporates selective export technology, allowing the user to designate which parts in an assembly should be shared feature-based, and which should be shared geometrically only, protecting intellectual property and saving time and space. With selective export, the user - not the tool - makes the decision on sharing features versus geometry;
• Delivers a log of all feature data extracted and decisions made while mapping features, associations, constraints, etc. between systems. The logged data may be transmitted to partners and/or archived for later reference;

• Reports physical properties comparisons between the source and target models, allowing the recipient to verify the correctness of the target model data. Beyond simple surface area comparisons, the Collaboration Gateway verifies the additional properties of mass, volume, center of gravity, and moments of inertia. Furthermore, when a deviation has occurred, The Collaboration Gateway's feature-level verification automatically identifies for the user the specific feature that caused the deviation, a great improvement over current solutions that require the user to search for the features that generated the incorrect surfaces.

  About Proficiency

  Proficiency is the innovator in engineering collaboration. The Company's Collaboration Gateway allows development teams within manufacturers and their suppliers to efficiently collaborate on the design of complex products. A privately held company headquartered in Marlborough, Mass., Proficiency has secured nearly $40M in venture capital investment led by Concord Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Carmel Ventures. The Company has numerous patents pending in engineering information representation technology. 

  www.proficiency.com 

  Proficiency and Collaboration Gateway are trademarks of Proficiency, Ltd. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

   
  

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